29.11.10

THE BIG INTERVIEW: JOHN HIGGINS

He looks markedly older than when I last saw him; paler, greyer and tired around the eyes.

We meet at the Telford International Centre where he will return for his first televised event since the end of his six month suspension. His media ‘handler’ wastes no time in laying down the ground rules: there are to be no questions about the specifics of what happened in the Ukraine for legal reasons.

John Higgins must be sick of talking about it, sick of trying to persuade people of his innocence. He says those he has met in the street have been supportive – indeed at Telford this is much in evidence – but he knows that there will always be some who will point the finger.

The events that brought about his fall from grace are like a permanent stain on his career: the surprise defeat to Steve Davis at the Crucible enlivened the World Championship but the newspaper account of Higgins’s subsequent visit to Kiev overshadowed the final and delivered a universal kick to the shins of everyone involved in the sport.

The record will show that Higgins was fined £75,000 and served out a six month ban. In Germany earlier this month he faced his fellow players for the first time at an event in the European Players Tour Championship. All were friendly but the three times world champion, mentally bruised by the whole affair, now finds it difficult to take even his friends at face value.

“I was nervous about how players would treat me but they were all fine – to my face anyway,” Higgins said.

“Nobody has said anything to my face. If they do then I can answer them. If they come up to me and say, ‘great to see you back’ what am I supposed to say? That they are lying? That they should tell me what they really think?”

So are some players being two-faced?

“Of course they are,” Higgins said. “I’d be naive if I didn’t think that. There’s jealous people in every walk of life. All I can say is that when I was growing up and practising with the likes of Stephen Hendry I was never jealous of them for the success they’d had. I wanted to try and replicate what they’d done. It was admiration, not jealousy. Sometimes in our sport maybe people are jealous when they should be getting their cues out and practising more.”

I cut to the chase. How does he feel about Pat Mooney, his former manager who has since been banned from ever playing any further part in snooker after the tribunal found him guilty of “an egregious betrayal of trust?”

At this, his media ‘handler’ bristles. Higgins shakes his head. “What’s done is done but if it didn’t make me more wary I’d be stupid,” is all he will say on the broken relationship.

Alas, this amiable man and legend of the game was pretty stupid to have said the things he did in that hotel room, even if you accept his explanation as to why he behaved in that way.

Even when he was cleared to return to the circuit he could not celebrate: his father, a popular figure in the game and hugely supportive of his son, had just been told his cancer was terminal.

Inside, Higgins must be wondering how it all came to this. From the age of nine, snooker was his life. Suddenly without it, he rattled around the house, waiting for the verdict. “I filled my days by helping out with the kids and normal things like that,” he said.

“People were asking me why I didn’t go to the club to practise but I didn’t want to do that when I didn’t know if there’d be an end goal to it. When the judgement came through it got me fired up again.

“I didn’t know what to think about what the judgement would be. I knew I’d have to take whatever it was on the chin. I did contemplate not playing again but I don’t have to think those thoughts now.”

The strength of his game has never been questioned but Higgins will also need mental toughness to shut out the whispering and suspicions of others and begin the process of rehabilitating his image. The forthcoming 12bet.com UK Championship in Telford, which he won in 1998 and 2000, marks the start of that journey.

He heads into it placed second in the rankings behind Neil Robertson, determined but anxious too.

“It’s my first time back playing in Britain so I’m nervous,” Higgins said. “People who’ve seen me grow up playing snooker on TV will have their own views. That’s just something I will have to accept. All I can do is my best.

“I’d like to get back to world no.1. It’s something to aim for. Neil Robertson is a great player. He’s grown in recent years and I've watched how he's changed his game. Now he’s world champion and he’s the man to beat.”

That status once belonged to John Higgins. Perhaps it will again but, right now, his main task will be to restore his battered reputation.

37 comments:

Glad to have him back on the circuit. He's right - there will always be doubters, but he has to focus on the fact that he still has many fans all around the world who want to see him hit the top of his game and put the whole mess behind them.

Looking forward to seeing him at the UK Championships. Best of luck John!

There are very many doubters on this issue. In my experience it's 90% against Higgins. Some of the comments I've heard couldn't be published on here.The comments in the video, however people want to sweep them under the carpet, are enough for most people to make an informed decision.Shame about his Fatha though:-(

shame people like one t matt cant take that those who were in a position to hear all evidence, to and for, and are in a position to make well balanced and legal judgements made them and john got punished for the only part he did wrong. shame that.

Mat Wilson: I bet the majority of those 90% were lazy enough or simply didn't bother to follow whole process of investigation or to read the resolution which this investigation resulted into - or even the briliant articles by Nick Harris in Sporting Intelligence.

It's always easier to condemn or flat out hate someone than to trust him, and as John himself says, there is a lot of jealousy involved as well.

I am 100% behind John McBride's lets move on & enjoy the man while we have him. Brilliantly said.

I don't care if John Higgins wins every tournament from now until he retires. For God's sake! You don't need any of the documentation that was presented at his hearing,all that needs to be known is his failure to report the approach straightaway. That's self-incrimination and it doesn't get clearer than that. In fact he did himself up like a kipper. Now he has this new PR guru he'll have someone else to blame for his so-called naivety.

A PR guru is usually more sophisticated about his work in having an inate knowledge of the paper,magazine or journalist interviewing his client and would be less intrusive in the recorded interview process itself.

A minder,nightclub bouncer type could only be so primitive as to doubt Dave's wisdom or technique.

Is this "media handler" the same one that encouraged Ronnie O'Sullivan to utter obscenities to the Chinese press a couple of years ago? I hope that fool was part of the Hearn clear-out!

To be fair to the Higgins detractors he couldn't have come across worse in the Kiev video... ultimately though it was a sting, there were no specific arrangements to fix the matches, and no match-fixing actually occurred. All we saw was a discussion and a player seemingly contemplating fixing a match. If it had been for real he might have gone ahead with it, but then again he might have thought better of it and refused to take part. Evidence accrued by entrapment is not admissable in a criminal court (at least in the UK), simply due to the fact a crime was never actually going to occur and I think that's the view snooker should take. Whatever happened never amounted to more than bad publicity for the sport, and he was found guilty and punished for that.

I still wonder why the NOTW decided to entrap Higgins in the way they did.Was it a tip off from someone attempting to discredit Pat Mooney (Hearn's right hand man) who by using dirty tricks, wanted the opposition to prevail in the players vote?Or more worryingly, was the sting set-up in the same way it was for the Pakistan cricket team because there were previous suspicions of malpractice which they wanted to expose?I am not saying this is true, but why exactly was this whole hidden camera scenario in Eastern Europe put together in the first place?

What "legal reasons" are there Dave for his minder insisting that Kiev was off the agenda? I thought it was over now the ban had ended. Is this not the case?Before he plays his opener in the UK I'm sure the BBC will want to interview him. Will they be subjected to the same restrictions? If so, then people's suspicions, rightly or wrongly, will be re-inforced.

20 years of impeccable career speak for themselves. I believe him, even though the heart is very heavy.John, we are with you! Good luck in Telford! Show envious that you did not break. We are with you, your loyal fans.

It’s amazing that some people haven’t yet accepted that the “thorough and publicized investigation” has not denied the authenticity of the NOTW video.

Higgins never even denied any of it and he admitted to the tribunal to have done exactly what the video shows him doing, so if some people choose to believe his word over the “scum of all scums” because of his “impeccable career” then, by all means, do it!

He is the one saying the NOTW video is real! If you don’t believe anybody else, believe him!!!

What people need to realize here is that even if he didn’t actually do anything corrupt, he showed how corruptible he could be. If they had offered him a bag with the money they were agreeing in that meeting he would have walked out with it, all smiley, and it would be the end of his career. That’s how close he was from hell.

His “impeccable career” was descending into “insurance bets”, and according to his former manager, he was fixing results of snooker matches for TV. This is another video you won’t find on youtube anymore, but some people have good memory.

These are the things that have come to public. Who knows how much more there was and how much Higgins “impeccable career” had descended.

And who knows if all these wasn’t what drew the attention of the NOTW to make him a target for a sting.